BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Lou Jones
ARTIST STATEMENT For the past few years I have been photographing the continent of Africa country by country. We are using the “universal language” of photography to illustrate contemporary Africa. Western media has for hundreds of years intentionally only told the story of poverty, pestilence & conict with negative images of children with ies on… Read more »
By Lorena Hernández Leonard
Estimados Solstice Readers, At the time of this writing I am recovering from COVID. In a household of four, three of us tested positive, suffering through the virus’s effects physically and emotionally. Ironically, just days before, on a lovely summer afternoon, my husband and I had been discussing with a friend how it felt that… Read more »
By Dennis Madamba
By Gabe Montesanti
By Elizabeth Keller
By Kristen Paulson-Nguyen and Jerel Dye
By Matthew E. Henry (MEH)
no. he weren’t no kin of mine. not my pa or grandpa. no grey-headed uncle neither. just some drifter mister Henry paid to be painted, same as me. but he was told to really teach me how to pluck and strum—told it made it “more authentic.” so I set there listenin’ to one mumble ‘bout… Read more »
By Quintin Collins
after Enzo Silon Surin Some mother said to always wear a clean pair of underwear in case of emergencies in which EMTs need cut off your pants, and some other mother said dress like every outfit is your last as if the funeral walks in lockstep. I iron wrinkles from my jeans, shirts, and chinos.… Read more »
By Liz Abrams-Morley
This morning you’re thinking about shoes, of a painting your sister is trying to complete, socked feet of all those young men, her son’s friends come to make a shiva call, to visit a mother in shock, grieving, boys removing sneakers so as to not soil her carpet. Fifteen years later, she paints what she… Read more »
By Rachel M. Dillon
or clatter them into the sink, I think of John Muir, suddenly blind by an awl snapped upward, piercing his eye. What remained? A hunger for holiness, like when I realize everything outside was made by someone’s hands—even the rats, boundless and loud, fat on trash. All of it, I fold into the suitcase of… Read more »
By Bonita Lee Penn
-after So What, by Miles Davis complex kind of blue man in a silent way kind of complicated man who birth coolness miles ahead his sounds this kind of mellowness his groove flawed and loved and feared even though his nothing or all stance towards women the drugs and all that within a world of… Read more »
By Robert Carr
after Octavio Paz Spring snows pink lips and you, beloved plot of dirt, take me to your lily-of-the-valley bed, rest my head on rising falls of flesh-drift and mudslide. I reach for your fumbling finger, you fill my gut with pebbles, roots. Lift me from your lowland, count half-children oozing from this body in the… Read more »
By Sara Dudo
I To erect a greenhouse on a perennial farm: 1, 2, 3 group push of metal arches up to heirloom sun dipping underneath each metal line along the other side rays peppering the eye we mourn spring eternal cycle: fingertips sweat along hot metal each ladder step a tinny hymn, echoing edict of screw… Read more »
By Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick
I was told there’s a fairy tale where all the daughters heal their own wounds by completing their assignment before midnight. Every Wednesday, the daughters set fire to the village & everyone agrees the daughters should burn as the summer & just as welcome. Look! The warmth the daughters bring, an offering. I was told… Read more »
By Mary Ann Honaker
She’s in her own little world, says one man to the other, as I walk by their front porch where they sit and drink beer with the front door wide open. Actually, I’m harvesting encounters: tiger lilies planted by a driveway, a bursting snowball bush, the curious way one tree’s branch turned ninety degrees to… Read more »
By Martha McCollough
in the dark museum taking the form of a little dragon burnt black, square-headed, crouching doggish at the angel’s feet the devil is so ugly-cute you want to take him home give him a cushion a little plaid blanket don’t you always make that mistake— what looked harmless enters the house begins to swell and… Read more »
By Samuel "Sami" Miranda
The jibaro builds his home on a mountainside the flamboyan adds its red to the view. The spaces between the slats allow the music of the pitirre’s call to enter the home and adds to the quiquiriqui of the rooster that struts his ownership of morning. The jibaro walks the mountain sees that it is
By Valerie Smith
the sunflower aches her long neck under duress of a blue roof’s eave her seed draws evening’s edge thin lines of black and white pinstripe yearn for unity. wine poured out burns closer to the stem’s sacrifice. roots, unmentionable. deep seeking. whole as the hovered sea carried in. currents pull color in bright directions. cool… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ewa Chrusciel
We are both darkness and light. Is the inside dark and the outside light, or the reverse? Ying and yang, night and day. Body and soul. We need one to know the other. Poet and translator Red Pine writes in dancing with the dead, “Language is at the surface of the much deeper flux that is… Read more »
By René Char and Eliot Cardinaux
THE PRODIGAL’S TORCH The quarantined enclosure burned You cloud move ahead Cloud of resistance Cloud of caverns Towing hypnosis. ONGOING TRUTH The crevice’s inventor Tugs tumult’s rope We gauge the depth Along the riled contours of the thigh The quiet blood that releases Confuses the needles Raises love without reading it.… Read more »
By Hasan Atiya Al Nassar and Anna Aresi
Silence Silence will come to me the silence that enters the garments of the dead. The moment was poor (abandoned and wounded) and our skies were foreign. We will flee looking for a Revolution, howled the wind, and our last days screamed, wounded. * Alleyway I A tavern in an alleyway. Skinny Alessio… Read more »
By Miłosz Biedrzycki and Jennifer Croft
from: MLB, Sofostrofa i inne wiersze, Kraków 2007 MLB, Porumb, Poznań 2013 9 beers for ox-calling The castors on the chair bellow like a wounded bull, weevil. Except the hearing is more sensitive this Tuesday morning excessive as a peeking squirrel. I remember Erzsébet Bridge, women were shaving their pits there back at… Read more »
By Rainer Maria Rilke and Steven Cramer
These “departures” repurpose originals from Rilke’s New Poems (1907/08) both stylistically and thematically, compressing each stanza by a line’s-worth and using, wherever possible, active verbs instead of the adjectives and adverbs so profuse in Englished Rilke. Encounter The avenue’s green shadows clung to him like a dark coat he kept needing to adjust; while off… Read more »
By Dimitra Kotoula and Maria Nazos
Case Study I The light falls lower now— Shadows on the steep mountains The atmosphere calm as meek milk and the griping city flock trudges through nothing. Between reality and hope where the empty moment was revealed the mind spreads its images. Dividing distinguishing varying it struggles to see with its sugary muscles open… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
First, I want to thank Grace Talusan, who judged our Michael Steinberg Nonfiction Prize. Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and went on to win the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction. The Body Papers was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Of… Read more »
By Allen M. Price
How long have I in bondage lain, And languished to be free! Alas! and must I still complain– Deprived of liberty. On Liberty and Slavery George Moses Horton thisismyschoolitisbeigethereismrshickey sheisnicesheismyteachersheissmilingilike hersmilesmilemrshickeysmilesheisplaying withherpapershereismyfirstgrade classroomthekidsareplayingwearehappy thereismeiambymyselfiamcoloringiseea kidbuildingwithblocksiwanttoplaycome andplayhelaughscaniplaywithyouhewill notplaywithmelaughingandplayingicryhe playsalltheotherkidsstareatmemrshickey walksoversheisfrowninghewillnotplaywith mewhynothisparentswillnotallowhimto playwithniggersirunhomeafterschool runningandrunningtomymomitakeoffthe keytiedroundmyneckandopenthedoor momisatworkmydogladyjumpsonmewoof woofshebarkssheisspringerspanielsheis brownandblackandwhitelikemewewillplay chaseiwillrunshewillchaseirunandirun runningandrunningiamstillrunningaway this is my school it is beige… Read more »
By Jendi Reiter
On the afternoon I come home from surgery, I converse with a giant snake. * On an evening six years before surgery, I am teaching a poorly-attended church group about Jungian theology. The wounded healer. Chiron the centaur. How to lie in the cave of Asklepius, on the couch from which clinic gets its… Read more »
By Amber Wong
The sharp staccato of Cantonese swirled around Ming’s Restaurant as twelve of us sat, shoulders almost touching, at a round banquet table. Steam billowed from the swinging kitchen doors, wafting a seductive scent of steamed buns and ginger. For a moment I was a child again, going to yum cha with my parents after… Read more »
By Adriana Páramo
I’m lying on my back, scrawny feet up in the stirrups. In my head, I go like, don’t look, don’t look, don’t you look at her, but of course, I do. I raise my head, and there next to the gynecologist is Mom, peering into my most private me. Mom cranes her neck over… Read more »
By Beverly Burch
Typewritten pages buried in an obscure book. Yellowing, unlined, composed by my mother with penciled corrections in her hand, they told family history in fits and starts, gleaned from my grandmother’s memory. On a wintry day, they fell out of the book so I sat on the floor to read them because my mother’s voice… Read more »
By Thuy Phan
I. Because you are only 5 feet 1.5 inches tall, and your limbs only stretch so far. You often speed-walk to keep pace with anyone over 6 feet. Because your family tells you that you didn’t drink enough milk while you were growing up. Because you hate the taste of it. As… Read more »
By Anne C. Wheeler
Mike Hippler wanted to be remembered. That’s what he told me, through the pages of his journal, approximately 31 years after he died from AIDS on April 4, 1991. When I arrived at the GLBT Historical Society, in the basement of a beautiful building on a seedy street in San Francisco, I knew that I… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
It’s a joy to present the selections for the 2023 Stephen Dunn Prize for poetry. The winning poem is “the Banjo Player Explains,” by Matthew E. Henry, selected by our poetry judge for this issue, A. Van Jordan. He writes: In one of the most assured ekphrastic poems I’ve read in some time, ‘the Banjo… Read more »
By Lee Hope and Ruth Mukwana
Dear SOLSTICE community, First of all, heartfelt thanks to Anjali Mitter Duva, distinguished novelist, who for the past two years served as our fiction co-editor. Anjali brought the combination of creativity, dedication and organizational expertise, which she is taking with her since she has co-founded an ambitious, author-oriented publishing venture Galiot Press. We will sincerely… Read more »
By Wandeka Gayle
I should have known when the neighbor’s rooster came in our yard one morning and crowed long and loud that nothing was set to go well that day, a sign of trouble like the old heads liked to say. I had folded and unfolded my father’s letter looking at the few words he had scrawled
By Nicholas Cormier III
On eggshells. Bunkie scrutinizes every move I make. You left water in the sink. I get up and wipe it dry. There’s a bead of piss on the back rim of the toilet. I get up and wipe it dry. Try to get ahead of him. Start sweeping the cell. Learn a few things. Like… Read more »
By Christine Neu
On a Tuesday evening in late July, Miriam and her lover Ted watched a storm roll in over the lake. They met at her dock every evening after Ted returned from visiting hours at the memory care unit. There, like a loyal goose, he had shared dinner with his wife, who spoke to him in… Read more »
By Chad V. Broughman
Tuesday, Sept. 8th – Last “Opening Day” Bullshit As I munch on some day-old bagels, push the sour fruit back and forth across my paper plate, the woman on stage keeps screeching, her words blur across the cafeteria like a raincloud. I can’t even pretend to indulge her. Some self-important ass-hat in high heels, tugging… Read more »
By Jan Schmidt
“Don’t be messin with my hustle, now,” Sandra says, her voice rough as a gravel path. We’re drilling our way down Broadway and Sandra adds, “I’m gonna push these motherfuckers into the street if they don’t get outta my way.” Nearby, a woman, long blond hair, young, wearing leggings, swoops in front of us, pushing… Read more »
By Chandreyee Lahiri
It started innocently enough—letter here, a word there—and he reasoned that Mrs. Pookutty needed the help, her English-in-retirement simply having acquired some rust since her School-Principal heyday. She probably meant to use the right word all along, the one Prabhakar had just typed. “The unexploded ordnance just lay thier, partially buried in the sand –… Read more »
By Anne Falkowski
She used to be a nurse. At our old house, I watched her get ready each morning. She began with pulling up white pantyhose. She never wore underwear which made me think I shouldn’t either. “You have to!” she said. “You don’t have a choice.” At our new house, Mom wears underwear. Her nursing uniforms… Read more »
By Alan Davis
The two Travelers, both women, one older, one young, together in a pickup with a camper shell where they sometimes slept. They drove the rural and snow-spackled Dakotas towards the horizon on a wintry afternoon across flat farmland blanketed in snow under the threat of more weather. “Nana, those are mountains.” “Serena, those are clouds.”… Read more »
By Ricki Morell
She came to the island with her two slim volumes of poems and the outfit she always wore to readings. The sweater jacket that her first husband, the artist, had given her. The slightly flared jeans from that store in Soho. And the patent leather flats that turned out to be completely wrong for walking… Read more »
By Helen Elaine Lee and Lee Hope
Pomegranate by the acclaimed author Helen Elaine Lee is one of the most significant novels of the last decade. It has received glowing reviews, and it was recently chosen by Amazon’s editors as one of the Best Books of the Year So Far, at #6. How challenging it is to write with compassion on each page,… Read more »
By Andrai Whitted and Jess Ruliffson
We are proud to offer our readers this amazing selection of submissions from our 3rd year of Graphic Lit (Comic Narrative) work. We are also extremely lucky to have had, Eisner-nominated cartoonist, Jess Ruliffson as a guest judge. Jess’ work includes her debut graphic novel, Invisible Wounds, nominated for an Online Journalism Award in 2023.… Read more »
By Lorena Hernández Leonard
Back in the fall when I was interviewing with Solstice’s Founding Editor Lee Hope and Founding Board Member Bill Betcher for the EIC role, it was evident how committed they were to the magazine’s mission of amplifying diverse voices. This point is worth highlighting. In my 20-year communications career, where I worked with small and… Read more »
By Rania Matar
Artist’s Note: Where Do I Go? As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War, Lebanon still suffers its consequences. After years of brutal Civil War, corrupt governments, months of Covid-19 lockdown; the 2020 Port of Beirut explosions further plunged Lebanon into the abyss and total economic meltdown, with shortages of cash, gas,… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
I wonder if anyone else has noticed the frequency with which the words transaction, transactive, transactional are becoming part of our current lexicon. I encounter them more and more frequently, not only in print but in conversation. I hope this means that we are catching on to the fact that slowly but surely we have all… Read more »
By Enzo Silon Surin
There is something to be said about transmitting information from one body to another, whether it be flesh, dust or ocean or the space between us, which, in itself, is time measured in distance. There is an infinite beauty in the way we change forms, at times seemingly intentional, and how we seamlessly move from… Read more »
Desire
Poetry In Translation Editors’ Note
Four Poems by René Char translated from the French by Eliot Cardinaux
Two poems by Hasan Atiya Al Nassar, translated from the Italian by Anna Aresi
Three poems by Miłosz Biedrzycki translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft
Two Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Departures from the German by Steven Cramer
Two Poems by Dimitra Kotoula, Translated from the Greek by Maria Nazos
Nonfiction Editor’s Note
How Much Time Do You Want For Your Progress?
Double Incision Diary
Can Abacuses Count That High?
A Minute of Silence
Bound
Why is it so hard to take up space?
The Virility of Memory
Poetry Editor’s Note
Note from Fiction Co-Editors
Solomon and The Shed
excerpt from novel-in-progress: Sweet Thing
D-Pod
Where the Beaver be Damned
Countdown to retirement: Random journal entries of a public-school teacher’s final year…
Pandora
Unexploded Ordnances
A Decent Dog
This Earth, That Sky
The Poet and the Fisherman
Interview with Helen Elaine Lee
Graphic Lit Editor’s Note
Note from the Editor-in-Chief
Where Do I Go?
Nonfiction Editor’s Note
Guest Poetry Editor’s Note
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